Color blind simulation

Abstract

Colorblindness is a color vision deficiency that the colorblind observers are unable to detect certain range of wavelengths and thus the color vision would be altered and they would find it difficult in distinguishing colors. The dichromate colorblindness of protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia, are the main focus of this project, while protanopia and deuteranopia are the most common type of the colorblindness, which also named as red-green colorblindness. This was a software development project that aimed to investigate methods to help colorblind observers to see the color difference in images. It is necessary for designer or software developer to understand the view in colorblind observers such that their products would be more general considered. A simulator would be implemented using MATLAB programming for simulating the appearance of colorblind images to normal observers. The simulation was performed in LMS color space, which is device dependent. As a result, experimental setup and practical measures had been done using the spectrometer. The results obtained from the simulator was implemented successfully and provided the ease to investigate correction methods. Using the techniques of image processing, two methods were investigated in this project: increasing the intensity of one of the color components in the image and modify the image in HSV color space. Both results are successfully applied to produce a recovered image for red-green colorblindness observers. The comparative analysis, using T-test, was carried out using questionnaires for the study of performance in these two methods. And it was found that the HSV modification method is having a strong evidence which gives a better performance than that of the increment in intensity.